This is All We Need for a Cow Butchering

Gideon, my man. I'm sorry, you can't— let me see that. You cannot wear that shirt. Why? It's too big. It's got to be one of the brothers. Uh, they've gotten distracted. Hey, chore time! Let's go, chore time! Go! 20 minutes ago. Come on. They didn't get up when I poked at them this morning. Hey, how come you guys didn't get up when I got you?

Oh, you woke me up at 6 o'clock.

I also woke you up at 5:30. See, Josiah got a new shirt. Jonah got a new shirt. Gideon wants a new shirt, but I bet you, you have new shirts your size. Is that one? Is that yours? That's a big one.

Okay, yeah, that's— what?

Hold it up to him. Yeah, that's big. It's just as big. There it is. Well, let's wear it again. It's not— it's not messy.

It doesn't feel fine.

The good thing about bringing in the farmstead meat smith, yes, Brandon, all the way from Washington State. You saying hey? Is we don't— he's gonna bring a lot of the equipment. Of course he's not gonna bring a gun, he is flying, but he can bring his gambrel. He can check his knives. But we need to set up the system and we have today That's it. Butchering's tomorrow.

Can I jump to you?

For sure. Good job. I want you to start feeding half the scraps to the breeders and half the scraps to the three little pigs, and that's it. I need to start digging for corn.

Royal, I'm gonna get your, um, cow butchering set up ready. I'm gonna get the pulley and the, like, some plastic and a pallet in case you have to put the cow down.

Yeah, and I'm thinking, where are we gonna hang it? I'm thinking we might be able to hang it in the shed.

That's what I'm gonna do.

So that would be ideal, where we have the— we're gonna have the chicken butchering.

I'll get some cardboard.

So let's get that area clean. We need to get some food-grade barrels up there for the carcasses. I said, what chores you want to do today, Gideon? Because we can do some. We'll do a divide and conquer with the boys. And he said, well, what chores do you have to use Cubby on? I said, well, we could use Cubby for the, uh, the sea monsters out in the field. Actually, that goes to the fat hen, fat chicks, so we could take Cubby down there too. What's this? Oh, you took my gimbal, huh? Or my— my pulley? Yeah, well, at least you found it. I don't know if Brandon will bring a pulley. We wanted that part of it to go as smooth as possible. We are filming 3 things at once tomorrow. We're filming Rooted, our television show. We're filming the vlog. We're filming a master class for Abundance Plus on how to on-farm butcher a cow and a sheep.

That'll snap.

We've got to move the sea monsters over. It's starting to rain. That's kind of bad news for you guys. Normally I don't like to drive on the pasture, but I think I will just to get you guys under cubby so you don't get wet. All right, what I first got to do is go through the checklist. So for the next 30 minutes, I'm gonna get ready for this butchering. First thing you do is shoot. Okay, I've got the gun, I've got the right ammo inside. We're using a.22 Magnum solid point— no, hollow, I don't know, uh, Brandon knows, I checked it. That's right. Well, we have to captivate the animals before we do that. I want to do this in field. I do not want to stress them out by pulling them away. You want a calm, happy animal all the way to the end. Very humane. Good quality meat comes from it. You don't taint the meat. Uh, rope halter for hamburger. We'll try and see if we'll be able to get him in the rope halter, you know, with some alfalfa or something. Oh my word, you got a stationary bike. Okay, do you want to come help me move Polly? No, the answer's yes.

I already did move Polly.

No, no, we're gonna move her back to the cow for a harvest of a nacho over there. Let's get rid of the, uh, let's get the cow out of here. We put Polly in here because, um, she was coming in heat and she's obviously too young and we don't want stud enough in the crusher. But now that we have not as many fences, we're down here, we can kind of monitor it. We'll put you back in with the sheep. You got more room with the sheep. You're a pretty cow. You're so pretty and gentle. Come on, I'll give you pressure from behind. Just go out the road here, Jonah, from the Suburban. Oh boy. Oh, Jonah, you let go! She got very excited. Hope this is gonna work out. There you go, back with your buddy Maple. Those two are roughly the same age. She's interested in Stud. Yeah, we gotta watch this, guys. Be careful about it. Next up is capturing Escalito. For sheep, we don't use a gun, we just go straight to the neck with a knife, uh, But we're gonna have to be able to catch him. Yeah, those are some food-grade barrels. We're probably gonna— we might need as many. I would get 3. I think we could use this gate right here and form a funnel to be able to corner them.

I was thinking we could put them in the trailer.

That's how we got them in the trailer, isn't it? We, we put them in a funnel and got them there. Why would we put them in the trailer?

Shouldn't that go— they'll not be eating.

No, it's okay. Oh wait, are these better? These are gates from our deep bedding that didn't work out. We haven't sold them yet. Helps if you list them for sale. We've got the animals captivated. Oh well, we'll need a knife for him, but Brandon's bringing his knives. We've got the gun for the cow. Then you got to get the animal from the field to the— where we're gonna dress them. That takes a tractor. Hey, got no problem there.

No, it's gonna start right up.

Hey, we'll put our forks on. We're gonna need a chain, so let's look at that while we're down here. The chains are down here. Hey, good morning. What we don't want to be doing is running around like this day of butchering. I know, we want everything to be in place. I know, and for it to go smooth. There's hooks. There's hooks. Let's take this.

Call the Inquirer. There's actually— oh, I know this chain.

There's some zip ties. Go grab them too. Grab those. Then you never know, you might need some zip ties. You got the, the pulley going? Let's put it on the metal though.

Okay, I thought about—

let's put it up close to this board. Let's get stuff like this out of the way. Okay, let's put all the chicken butchering stuff in the corner. Oh, let's hook this up just so you can wash your hands. We have water right here, Jonah.

Yeah, let's do it, right?

Yeah, yeah, here. Okay, easy to hook up to that.

This is the gut bin.

Okay, that's good.

Big and nice.

All right, so get our ladder. And let's get this down. Oh, we should use one of those heavy carabiners, heavy-duty carabiners we got. That little carabiner, I don't trust it. And then we'll hang it right here. We've got to get that bucket off, move it over there. You can't see because the tractor's in the way. And then come back and get the forks. Jonah thought the hay prong might be better.

Got that huge fork in the middle. Yeah, and it's really light, so it would have— you could have more weight.

So we would drive in here with the tractor and you have to lift it up to connect it. So you'd have to come at this angle. We want to be far enough down that we're not going to hit this pole. I'm finding a lot of reasons to use a tractor lately, aren't I?

I know.

All right, we got the hay forks on. I like that because we can wrap around the chain around that middle. We've got one big chain over here, a bit of tidying up to do. Hey, little Henry, you come to see the action? You can't miss out, can you, Farmer Henry? This is where you belong. Do we still have the rope halter in here? Okay, good. Yeah, I'll spot you. Come on, come on. She's all alone in this paddock, not happy about it. She kicked at me. Boy, you sassy. You're a sassy thing. Works better going—

Mom's calling.

She's back, baby in one arm. There they go. What a sight.

Come on, beautiful.

Do you want a bouncy chair for the— for this boy? It would probably be good. Your arm has got to be getting tired. Yeah, it is. Back at the house, gonna get a collar for Hamburger. We'll definitely rope halter him to get control of his head, but it's a little easier when you can grab his collar and then put the rope halter on. Hey buddy.

Hi.

Can we go swimming?

Not yet. Look at this mess in here. We gotta finish chores. Collars should be in here unless your children took interest in them. That's not where the electric goes. Okay, do you think this one's too small for him? You do?

Yes.

Do you think this one's too big? You don't? We got this big car— can you go ahead and get that little carabiners off that? We can use that up there. So I grabbed the big carabiner out of there. I'll take both belts in case, but it would also be good to have a hole punch. Did you find it? Good deal. Let's get Alfalfa on it and do that collar. We forgot our collars in the, in the cubby, but this is good. The other ones are not paying attention. This would be a great time to do it. Yeah, he just left. But what we can do is just give everybody a little bit of alfalfa, and then I'm pretty sure we can catch him. Fed him up in front wind of it.

Be careful, those horns.

This is working. Oh yeah, this is a perfect size. I mean, we can practice putting this on so he's not too weirded out tomorrow. That was super easy. H marks the spot. It's gonna make it super easy to shoot. That's definitely the hardest part for me. You definitely want to get it right or they still stand and then they're in pain. You don't want to do that. You want to knock them out real good. Brandon can coach me a little bit on that. I don't know if the H is right where we need to be. Can I be point-blank and not worry about ricochet? Because I'd just rather have no— like, what's the safe distance? All right, let's get this off before he's done. It's gonna work. We'll tie him up over. We've killed. Now what? Well, skin. You need a 4x4. To hoist, you know, to keep them laying straight on their back. Once you guys get your hose going, let's rinse them out and put them in the sun. 4x4. Oh, is that one? That'd be too easy. That's a 2x2. There's one.

Oh wow.

All right, yay. All right, one's kind of short, but hopefully it'll do. If that one isn't long enough, we've got the fresh ones we made off farm if we have to. On today's episode of Burn It Up Cooking Show, Beef ribs. I honestly— well, I've never cooked beef ribs. I didn't even know it was a thing. Why didn't somebody tell me? So we're gonna first pull the membrane off using a paper towel to get this back thin layer of which— of membrane off. Now let's salt the meaty side, just sprinkling some salt on there. I do wash my hands in between Cuts. We want to braise this. Fat of choice, I reckon, would be tallow, wouldn't it? But is this any good? It's a year old this month. Actually, it smells just fine. Oh yeah, that's right, we got no smell of this one. Okay, that was a corny dad joke, wasn't it? All right, I'm getting a shallow pool of beef tallow fat. Now we're gonna just sear it.

I don't think I can put two in there at once, can I? Yeah, I can. Let's check it.

Ooh, it's braising nicely.

All right, a little more like that, and then we'll flip it around. How's that one?

A little more. While that's braising, I have some beef broth gelatin. How am I gonna— how am I gonna get this off? Like normal cooking shows, they already show all this prepared in a nice clear glass bowls. But how did you get the frozen broth out of the plastic thing? Oh, there it goes, there it goes. That was easy. All right, let's get this melted. It's going to melt in the oven, but it's nice to see how much liquid we're dealing with. Our broth is melting down a good bit. You know what I think I'm going to do with this? I think I'm gonna pour it on top of the— I'm gonna pour it in here. Boy, we splattered everywhere. Wouldn't be the Burn It Up Cooking Show without a big mess, would it? We've got it on 250 and we've got about 7 hours till supper. Do you think that's too hot, Rebecca? Do you think it's warm enough? It's on 250, covered, and then we're gonna add the, uh, cut up potatoes, onions, and carrots maybe 2 hours before supper. What do you think? Maybe 3 hours? Hey Josiah, now that we have our supper in, we can cook our lunch. It's actually really perfect. That's the way I like it. Slow, slow and steady cook. You're making everybody fried eggs. I'm cleaning up this grease off the oven. Better to do it right away than later. It's been 3 and a half hours. I've been working on a, uh, console I'm gonna do for Abundance Plus. A lot of people end up asking me for consult. A lot of people have the same kind of question, so I thought, what if I take somebody who's already in Abundance Plus, my member area, and say, okay, we are good here. 182, we're super tender.

Oh my word, look how tender that is. But I am afraid there's not enough.

I mean, I could eat 2 of those things.

And then we're gonna drop this in our liquid.

Now that's a lot of veggies, but people are going to be all about that. I mean, that versus that.

Being kind of quiet because Henry is asleep. Okay, let's let that cook.

I guess it's just gonna have to be a vegetable party thing. So what I was saying there is, why not do a consult with somebody on Abundance Plus and record it? And make it available to everybody. We actually already did a call. It was great, it had a lot of value, and then my big toe hit the battery, uh, plug-in saver, surge protector, and we lost it all at the very end. Ben just sent over, uh, Rooted episode 4. No, which one are we shooting tomorrow? No, we're not 4, we're at like 7. Okay, for the butchering, uh, this is interesting, the story arch. So building the story arch, getting back from the Great American Farm Tour, really locking in on our health, coming to face with some of our health issues, sinking down, then going through this cows and sheep die, was it our fault, why I do this. Do something even if it's wrong. So this is the coming out of it. Do something if it's— even if it's wrong. Talking to Pete Canaris in the rain, answering why we do this, and then coming out in a butchering and redemption. And wow, this guy is a phenomenal storyteller. It's going to be so beautiful how that comes together on film. Love having him on the team for sure. You know, this seems kind of rugged and discombobulated, a hair as, as a viewer, I'm sure. But I think you get the general idea. I get the general idea. I'm going to improve this, but this is how it all begins. An idea in the head, and then writing it down, and then shooting it, and developing, and then editing and developing that story. I just love it how an idea can go from this to a movie. In other news, our app, our Abundance Plus app, is ready for testing in iOS, which is Apple, and Apple TV. So I have about 45 minutes to work out. I might see if I can't start testing that. I don't know if I like— this has been a round icon, and they're fitting my square image in that. Open. Look, that was super slick. Abundance Plus would like you to send notifications. Of course. Watch on any device. You'll get access. Okay, so this is what it looks like if somebody were shopping on the app. I wish you could— can you guys see that? Okay, there you go. You'll get access with all our platforms. Explore and watch videos on your phone, tablet, and laptop. One week free trial, then $14.99 a month. So yeah, that's one— that's one cool thing. You guys will be able to download and view later. I wish this said like no ads. You don't have any ads. You can watch the newest release. This is good. This looks good. Uh, the new release is, uh, Rooted 3, which is not— that needs to be updated, but that's on our end. Uh, these are some things I already started watching: The Sheep Shaw, The Meat Chickens Master Class. The vlog, Rooteds, gardening, chickens, cows, sheep. Love it. Looks good in the app. Oh wow, you're scrolling like we made something that you can scroll. Like, for those people now, it's crazy. We're having our— gonna have our own app very, very soon. Nice. Do you realize what's happening here? You're watching Rooted on the phone.

I know, it's crazy.

This didn't happen before. Like, that was hard to do before. Now it's just hit the app, go watch the latest episode of Rooted. Oh, it's beautiful.

Oh, there it goes to where I was, where I was.

Did it pick up my salad?

Yeah.

Well, that's smooth. Only a few minor changes to the app, like— let's go with a— they went with a white background, but I was kind of wanting a black background. My assistant had a good point. It kind of— it looks good, but it kind of looks like YouTube. And this is very different than YouTube. This is our own YouTube. It's our own platform. A few weeks ago we decided to get a CT scan. I just had that a couple of days ago.

You had us do it.

Everything looks good. Everything looks good. Came back great. Yep.

Came back.

Everything's fine. So this 40-year-old man has nothing wrong with his heart or his vascular system.

I will say it's funny because he's having his stool test done as well.

We won't talk anymore about that one.

And he is like all freaked out about that, and I'm like, it's totally normal. And he— I was freaked out about the test. And he's like, oh, it's totally normal.

We're gonna see what my gut looks like. And then, you know, my stool looked a little funny, you know. I guess I've never really dropped my stool in a— you literally drop it in a french fry container, which I don't think I was ever gonna plan on eating that kind of thing again, but definitely not ever gonna again.

It's so funny because the first time I did it, like, they, they give— you get a kit and you take the thing out and it's what you, you, you—

it is literally, it's a french fry, what you would put a cheap At what, what the fair would put you french fries in, or onion rings. Okay, and then we, we did— we're doing the urine test too, so that'll give us an idea of what kind of Lyme disease I've got.

So we sent the urine test off a couple weeks ago, and I accidentally missed— put it in the package wrong, so they couldn't do the test. So we do the urine test, and then now the stool sample's going in. We've had the x-ray done on your dental. So like, we're, we're trucking through to figure out what's wrong with you.

So in the meantime, let's go do our workout. It's that time, and that's been helping me about as good as anything, those stretches that we do. Workout time. Beautiful spot on the farm. All right, that was a good training. We're actually training, you know, we, we learned the warm-ups and the cooldowns last week, but now we might actually be sore in the morning. Boom! Just fine. That's, uh, this is just gonna— oh, that's literally falling off the bone. That's gonna be delicious. All right, let's cook it now, face open. You got shoes, Mr. Brown? Okay, Hannah are gonna go get Brandon, the master butcher, farmstead meatsmith. One, uh, cool thing about Abundance Plus that I'm really excited about— where's our car? Oh, it's way down there— is YouTube restricts the showing of that kind of thing, but that's an important part of the homestead journey, of growing your own food journey, especially if you're going to eat meat. So what's cool is I don't have those restrictions on Abundance Plus, so We'll continue to put the, the G-rated version on YouTube, but then for those who are more serious and maybe really need to learn this stuff or get the idea of this stuff or appreciate the sacrifice animals go through, then you'll probably want to watch the vlog on Abundance Plus. It's not available yet, but, but it is coming very soon. All right, hop in. So we're looking at launching the new website, maybe even the new apps. Because he was like, uh, once I approve it, it'd be 5 days. Hopefully I can find time to do that. I don't know when though, we're 12-hour film shoots tomorrow, the next day. Uh, let's have to get up crazy early or something and, uh, get these approved because maybe we could be launching the app— anyway, the website for sure— by end of June. I sat there at the airport. I should have got his flight information because it's been delayed. He's an hour late. I mean, we're so close to the airport. We're just gonna go home, eat, and then come back for him. Shoot, I totally forgot to document eating that— those beef ribs. Let me tell you, we're gonna have them again. I didn't make enough. That's how good they were. Looks like the flight is in. Big lines out here. Looks like we beat him here. He's not out waiting for us. That's good. Now we're just gonna chill here. There we are, got him. So we're gonna— we're taking Brandon around and just— we're just gonna go around real quick and make sure everything's set up right and we got things in good order. So you see this 16 by 16 pen? Yeah, I'm thinking— see that red gate right there? Yes, we can kind of funnel him into a corner, herd him into a corner. Yeah, does that sound good to you? And kind of get them both going, and then we'll grab a hold of him, get him on his Honey, that would be the idea. Get him off his feet.

Yeah, we can funnel them together into the corner and then extract him.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. You think so?

Yeah, or maybe actually, yeah, just lay him down right where we catch him and then the ram can go about his business.

Yep, we gotta lay him down and then do the deed. Yeah, as fast as possible.

I, I tend to read them, you know, sometimes you find that if you lay them down, they immediately surrender.

Yeah.

And sometimes you can, if you surrender them properly, you can stand back up and they'll stay down.

Yeah. Okay.

Other times they fight you the whole time, in which case you just want to—

yeah, because if they're stressed out, we just don't want them to be stressed out. Yeah. Is that why, or do you have other reasons?

Um, if there's just no— nothing to be gained from holding down a stressed animal If— yeah, I always try to avoid coercion, you know. Okay, least amount of coercion possible.

It's good.

Then they can, uh— that just means we're, we're not at odds, you know. We're not fighting against each other.

Yeah, that's a good word. So here's our butchering shed. Okay, don't know if— yeah, this is— we're gonna put the carcasses when they're done, we're gonna put them in a cool room overnight and take them to the butcher tomorrow morning. Okay, I mean the next morning.

Yeah, so you have a cool room somewhere?

Yeah, we have a walk-in cooler.

Oh, beauty.

I mean, we could hang them ourselves and then break them down, but we don't.

We just—

yeah, outsource the breaking down. Yeah, yeah. Uh, don't know, what do you think? You think this will hold for a beef? Should we— I mean, we could go look at the beef and see. Yeah, if it won't, we're going to be looking at a tree limb somewhere.

Okay, yeah, let's size them up, see how big he is. Okay, see Okay, so that's not continuous.

It's on top.

Oh, it is on top a little bit.

Yeah, it is on top. It's not just bolted in the side. Okay, well, maybe it isn't. It's continuous down here. Yeah, we could totally move this closer. Yeah, I just want— can you be right on the beam and it's not getting away?

Yeah, it'll be a little bit, but not, not too bad.

We could, if you're nervous, we could put a— we we could put a 2x4. Yeah, another additional failsafe. I can't tell if it is continuous up there. Yeah, I'm gonna put her on the tractor and— yeah, I know it ends. Yeah, it just got in there by 4 bolts though. So you think we can actually get these under him and maneuver him that way? Yeah, I think once you see him you'll think— yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, and this is better than a pallet fork, you're saying, because the spikes? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, that way we don't have to lift them.

All right, go straight under. All right, cool. So there he is. I'm gonna say he's what, 600 pounds live weight?

That sounds pretty good to me, actually.

Um, H— so somewhere in the 600-700 pound range then. He looked manageable. Yeah, I mean, we have so many people as well in a pinch.

That's true.

I forgot it's gonna be like 8 people, probably.

Everybody grab one leg.

3, 4, 5. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think there's gonna be 6 men.

That'll be good.

7, 8 if we need it.

Yeah.

All right, we're done. It's been a big day. Gonna be a big day tomorrow. We'll see you guys then.